Night Skies

Outside just now for a smoke break. Heard a jet flying overhead, and of course, I looked up. I spotted the jet almost instantly (a redeye out of KSAN) but also spotted a slightly bigger than usual shooting star. It blazed across the sky for perhaps a second, maybe a second and a half. But I got to see it.

4 thoughts on “Night Skies”

Sunday night in Baraboo was clear and fairly cool, ( -17, -35 wind chill ), and I was headed West on US 12, and I was lucky enough to see a fireball cross the sky ahead of me, a brilliant emerald green one. Such a pretty sight!

Here in the southeast it’s hard to get a good dark sky. I took the grandkids out to catch the Leonids a few years back and even on Water Rock Knob on the Blue Ridge Parkway we had light pollution at levels that made it hard to catch many of the meteors. We finally gave up in frustration.

My sister Martha has lived in Mass/Rhode Island since 1985. One year Martha brought her friend Darwyn, and Darwyn’s kids out for her annual summer visit, ( Martha’s husband is a big city boy, and finds the large open spaces and tree cover of Wisconsin unsettling ). Darwyn has lived her entire life in the suburbs of Boston, where, on a dark night, several thousand stars can be seen. A dark Wisconsin night during the new moon, with millions of stars, and the swath of the Milky Way being visible came as quite a surprise. I have seen nights in winer, after a new fall of snow, where the sky has been scrubbed clean of dust and dirt by the snow, where the light of the stars is enough to read by, and moonlit nights where you could have driven without headlights. I shall always be a rural Badger!